César Pelli, FAIA, the architect behind such iconic buildings as the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, dies at his home in New Haven, Conn., on Friday. He was 92.
Pelli was born in Argentina in 1926, and received a diploma in architecture from the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Argentina’s Tucumán province, where he grew up. After school, he worked in the office of Eero Saarinen on such projects as the TWA Flight Center at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport (the head house of which reopened as the TWA hotel earlier this year) and the Morse & Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale University in New Haven. He later worked as director of design at DMJM and then as a partner at Gruen Associates.
Pelli started his own firm, César Pelli & Associates Architects, in New Haven in 1977, the same year he started his tenure as dean of Yale University's School of Architecture. His deanship ended in 1984, but his firm, which he founded with Fred W. Clarke, FAIA, continues today as Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (it was renamed in 2005 to reflect the other senior principals, Clarke, and Pelli’s son, Rafael Pelli, FAIA), with additional offices in New York, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, Tokyo, and San Francisco.
The firm’s portfolio includes such landmark projects as an addition to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (completed in 1984, and partially replaced by Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion), Herring Hall at Rice University in Houston (1984), New York’s World Financial Center (1988, now known as Brookfield Place), and the Wells Fargo Center in Minneapolis (also 1988). The 1,483-foot-tall Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur (1998) reigned as the tallest buildings in the world from their completion until 2004, and last year the firm completed the Salesforce Tower and Transit Center in San Francisco.
Pelli won more than 300 design awards during his career, ranging from a 1966 Progressive Architecture Award for the Urban Nucleus at Sunset Mountain Park (from his time at DMJM) to the Aga Kahn Award for Architecture for the Petronas Towers in 2004. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal for his lifetime of work in 1995.
In a statement issued the day after Pelli's death, AIA executive vice president and chief executive officer Robert Ivy, FAIA, said: “César Pelli was a consummate architect, teacher, and mentor. Rooted both in the creative legacy of Eero Saarinen and the pragmatic leaders of west coast development, César transformed skylines around the world and influenced the modern city as we know it. A master of both the urban scale and the carefully conceived individual detail, he leaves a legacy that stands as tall as the buildings he designed and as rich as the lives of the many architects whose careers were shaped by his generous teaching.”
